


Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

by PaleBlueEis



Series: an age at least to every part [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dessert & Sweets, M/M, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaleBlueEis/pseuds/PaleBlueEis
Summary: Aziraphale takes Crowley on a date, not that he calls it a "date" in so many words. Or in any words. Even for a retired angel who keeps a feelings journal, there are limits. Crowley knows this, he just wishes he knew what they were.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: an age at least to every part [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981162
Comments: 7
Kudos: 9





	Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wordstrings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstrings/gifts).



> Fourth in a series, but if you can fill in the blanks of Crowley and Aziraphale alternately failing and succeeding at communication, you'll be okay. Previously, Aziraphale has discovered self-help literature, while Crowley has opted for the drinking-all-night-and-walking-around-London approach to PTSD, leading to an unlikely friendship and a late morning nap. Also, everyone has issues with T. S. Eliot.
> 
> I should have dedicated the whole series to wordstrings (I have no anxiety about influence), but I didn't think of it until now.

Even in the midst of enjoying a perfect piece of baklava, Aziraphale couldn’t help but notice that Crowley was looking very well in the sense of...yes, that, but not entirely well from the point of view of whatever the demonic equivalent of health was.

He was a stunning demon, particularly as he savored bittersweet coffee with an expression to match, and yet he looked worn around the edges, a little smudged under the eyes. No longer reeling on his feet as he had when he’d reached the bookshop that morning, but not rested. It wasn't as if Crowley hadn't often looked troubled over the years. Hell’s work didn’t always come naturally to him, and he tended to take human suffering rather more to heart than Aziraphale did, which should have been surprising (though less so now that the angel had a more—call it realistic understanding of his former employers.) Still, Crowley hadn't looked quite this haggard, at least as far as Aziraphale knew, since the Inquisition.

It didn’t do to stare, but it did do very well to glance now and again while one’s demon was occupied by chatting with the waitstaff. As part of one’s glancing, one might notice the waitstaff in question glancing also, with surprise, at Crowley, and then back and forth between Aziraphale and Crowley, then smiling and nodding and at one point _winking_ at Aziraphale while pouring water into a glass from behind Crowley’s chair. And then giving Aziraphale a “thumbs up,” if Aziraphale wasn’t mistaken.

Aziraphale could feel his face heat and hoped it wasn't very noticeable.

Of course it was nothing new for people to assume the angel and the demon were a couple, not in the past few decades, at any rate. The frequency waxed and waned over the millennia with the acceptability of such relationships, and it had never occurred to Aziraphale to let it bother him any more than when people thought he and Crowley were friends—that is, no more than any other assumptions made on the basis of their being humans rather than immortal adversaries. Unless, of course, those assumptions seemed likely to get back to Heaven, in which case it had bothered Aziraphale very much indeed. 

_I don’t even like you…_

Right. The angel cut himself off. According to his new regime of extreme discomfort and emotional accountability, Aziraphale was meant to be naming his feelings. As for the emotion that flooded him when he recalled his behavior in the bandstand, he would much prefer to call it something like Lionel or Elspeth, if he were going to be in the business of giving names to things (he’d always felt he could have done a bit better than Adam if anyone had thought to ask), but he knew perfectly well that “guilt” and “shame” were more appropriate in this instance. He'd named those feelings several times already just that day.

So the angel knew by now without having to consult the little notebook in his pocket that "guilt" and "shame" were deemed Unhelpful beyond their initial role in leading him to take measures to Change the Behavior. And measures, as the same little notebook could excruciatingly attest, he was definitely taking. Having had front row seats for some of the more impressive sacrifices in human history, the Principality of a Spiral Bound Feelings Journal would go so far as to say that willingly devouring a shelf full of pop psychology might reasonably be included in their ranks.

These books suggested that feeling "guilt" and "shame" about feeling "guilt" and "shame," which seemed to be Aziraphale's natural next step, was not the recommended response. Some preached acceptance, but the angel bridled at that. He thought he might well have accepted a good many things that were unacceptable in his time, including his own actions or the lack thereof. But as with the self-righteous anger that the angel would like very much to punch off his own sanctified face, the actions that gave rise to the “guilt” and “shame” likely, he’d been given to understand, had an underlying cause. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Fear.” Yes, that was a good name. Simple and easy to remember.

_And in short, I was afraid…_

It wasn't as if Aziraphale needed a bookshelf full of wittering wellness gurus to tell him he was a hopeless ditherer who'd let fear put him off all the things he most wanted, not when he'd had a full century of T. S. Bloody Eliot reminding him in a devastating mish-mash of free verse and mocking couplets.

He had damned the man already today and Crowley had assured him more than once it was superfluous in any case, but was it too much to ask for one dead poet with beastly politics to leave Aziraphale out of it? The angel had finally, after all this time, decided that it *was* worth it, after all, and even if he wasn't exactly sure what "it" was, it was with Crowley, and Aziraphale was dedicated to it. Wasn't that the reason he was reading horrid books about feelings despite their crimes against prose?

The real trick of the method Aziraphale was trying diligently to learn was to be aware of one's feelings without spiraling down into an anxious darkness that only repression of said feelings could relieve. Or, of course, Crowley. When his behavior to Crowley had caused it all, though, relying on him for this service was a bit complicated, ethically speaking. It was apparently bad form to rely on the people one had hurt to assuage one's guilt about hurting them. He'd made notes about that first off.

Aziraphale took another bite of baklava and allowed himself a moment to enjoy it. "A time for every purpose under heaven," after all. He wanted to look across at Crowley, but he knew that was unlikely to help his clarity of thought. Thankfully, one of the many great advantages of Crowley as a companion over any other entity in Creation was that he wasn't uncomfortable when Aziraphale fell quiet.

_So. Let’s try this again._

It hadn’t used to bother Aziraphale when people thought he and Crowley were friends, but it _had_ made him achingly sad when he worried it wasn’t true, and horribly anxious when he worried it was too obvious that it _was._ And when people thought they were more, the fact was that since a particular evening in a bombed-out church and quite a bit before that, since he was being honest, it made him simultaneously flush with pleasure that it looked true and ache with the knowledge that it _wasn’t_ and never could be.

Never, _never_ had it bothered him as much, though, as it had when the angels had been taunting and punching him in the gut over it. That had combined the worst of both worlds by not being true and getting him in trouble with Heaven anyway. It seemed insult to injury (which, of course, it literally was) to be punished for something when he’d never dared to take the smallest step towards actually Doing Anything About It.

Or, frankly, even towards figuring out what “Doing Anything About It” might mean.

Aziraphale still didn’t know what it meant, but as he at last looked up to watch Crowley watching him eat a lovely sticky, flaky piece of baklava, he felt again with some urgency that it was past time he investigate the matter further. 

Though not perhaps quite the same urgency he felt about ridding Crowley’s face of the haunted look hovering around him the past few days. Not that it wasn’t understandable, but Aziraphale wanted it gone rather more decisively than had been achieved by a kip on his sofa and a…a kiss, on his forehead—

Aziraphale stopped breathing a moment, just to honor the thought with complete quiet, eyes closed. To think one could be here for millennia and still have anything be so new.

Gratitude. Gratitude was one of the good ones. He ought to encourage that one. And express it. As a counterbalance to that pesky guilt. Aziraphale remembered distinctly writing the note about it. Still, it was really not _on_ to say out of nowhere in the middle of a Hackney restaurant “I appreciate your having kissed my forehead.” He felt certain it was impossible that anyone had ever said any such thing in the entire history of the world, and if Aziraphale were to try, he and Crowley would probably both be struck down on the spot, not by Heaven or Hell but by the affronted pagan gods of awkwardness.

 _In a manner of speaking only,_ he nervously directed upwards, just in case.

Old habits really were quite difficult to break, weren’t they? Easier to make new ones.

Aziraphale breathed out, open his eyes, and smiled. He slowly brought the last bite of baklava to his lips and savored it, tasting the honey that clung to his lips. “That,” he said, carefully applying his words to several different experiences at once, “was absolutely divine.” He paused, considering. “Well,” he said, correcting, “it’s what divine _should_ be, at any rate."

Crowley shook off the reverie that could sometimes overtake him when he watched Aziraphale eat desserts and smirked. “If Heaven had been more like baklava, you probably would have just stayed up there, and I’d have never—” he broke off. He could not _go_ there. “And we’d have never saved the world at all,” he said quickly, “so you’d still be out sushi dinners. In the end, it’s probably for the best that Heaven’s got less personality than an Apple store.”

“Than an apple shop?” Aziraphale’s brow furrowed slightly and Crowley cursed himself for finding it cute. “I’ve never been in a shop where they only sell—I suppose by an orchard, perhaps. But I don’t think Heaven’s much like that. An orchard shop would probably be all lovely wooden barrels and musty smelling—oh, I see. You were being Biblical. Heaven an apple store, indeed. You old serpent.”

Crowley rolled his eyes so hard he had to use his whole head to do it. “Angel, I was being the least amount of Biblical it’s possible for me to be. An Apple store is where they sell these—” He waved his iPhone in front of Aziraphale’s face. “They’re famously blank, and sterile, and white…oh, forget it. Why would I assume you’d entered the twenty-first century?”

“I’ve no idea, Crowley. It’s not as if we’ve just met,” Aziraphale said primly, and signaled for the bill.

The very handsome young waiter who only slightly annoyingly doted on the angel was at their table as if he’d been waiting his whole life for the chance. Crowley watched and tried not to glower as they chatted and Aziraphale preened and glanced at him and blushed.

Not for the first or indeed the thousandth time, Crowley was caught between feeling a leaden weight in his stomach at the angel’s obvious pleasure in a pretty man’s attentions and a bit of a thrill at the same, because it had always seemed to him that if the angel was open to that kind of pleasure from a waiter (for example) that at least signaled a possibility—didn’t it?— that was surely hopeful, even if Crowley himself wasn’t currently the object—

The angel’s blush deepened as the kid told him, again, how happy they all were that Mr. Fell had brought his friend and that the coffee and the baklava were on the house. Aziraphale glanced at Crowley again, looked down, and then beamed his thanks at the waiter.

It was at this moment that it hit Crowley like a ten ton truck that Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate and Crowley's Napping Sofa, was _showing him off_. He was proud to be seen with Anthony J. Crowley, ex-hellfiend and general demonic reject, in one of his little restaurants.

Aziraphale’s blush was because of _him,_ Crowley. The glances were because of _him._ Not just to prove Aziraphale had a friend, like he’d said, but because he had _this_ friend. Aziraphale not only wasn’t denying Crowley. He wasn’t only acknowledging him. He was _proud_ _to be seen with him_.

If Crowley could have spared a thought for the pathetic, shivering snake who’d panicked his way through the Chelsea Physic Garden not hours before, he’d have wondered what on earth the silly reptile was on about. Because everything was _fantastic._

(He did think fleetingly of texting Young Audrey to say “I told you so” but concluded that a six thousand year old occult entity didn’t need to prove anything to a teenager or, for that matter, outdo them in childishness).

Since this newly proud Principality had shown every sign of wanting Crowley’s company and not just a freshly-caffeinated puddle of quivering goo, said goo thought he ought to pull himself together. There being nothing better for that purpose than a little angel flustering, Crowley leaned back and got his stare on.

Aziraphale had been in the middle of suggesting a walk to see if they could puzzle out the site of the old Stoke Newington manor from among the bakeries and clothing stores when he stopped mid-sentence.

Damn and blast, thought the angel. It had all been going swimmingly well. Crowley seemed to have lost that haunted look for the time being. Aziraphale had successfully expressed appreciation for several things at once and if Crowley didn’t know he’d meant anything other than the baklava, Aziraphale did, and that was a start. But now the infernal creature was looking at him in the way that threatened to turn all of Aziraphale’s insides into liquid, and if he let that happen, he wouldn’t be walking anywhere, would he, and no matter how happy the waitstaff was to host them, he thought they wouldn’t want a liquid angel on their hands all the way into the dinner rush.

But honestly, the ridiculous way this vexing demon could lean back in two different directions at once while a slow smirk curved up his face in yet a third, and then still somehow manage to stare at him from underneath his lashes—that shouldn’t be possible, should it? It made Aziraphale forget to breathe, which then made talking difficult, and so now he was stuck gaping like a hooked fish, which—could hardly be flattering. The overall effect rivaled Crowley’s watching him eat dessert in terms of increasing the urgency of Doing Something About It, whatever that might mean, but at the same time seemed likely to reduce the chances of success to almost nil.

Hooked fish being somewhat lower on the general attractiveness spectrum even than fussy apparently middle-aged booksellers recently let go from Heaven.

No one wanted to kiss a hooked fish, did they? Even if the fish was beginning to think that kissing was something it wanted?

Aziraphale huffed a sigh, not having much else at hand to offer. “For goodness’ sakes, Crowley!”

Crowley’s smirk inched a fraction higher and stretched back a little farther in his chair and looked positively serpentine. For obvious reasons. Still, the object of one’s affection having six thousand years of tempting experience did put one rather at a disadvantage, especially when it took all one’s care and attention to stop gaping like a misplaced carp.

“Showing me off, were you, angel?” Crowley said, slow, and low, and mocking, and absolutely insufferable. Clearly anticipating the flustered denial Aziraphale was sure to offer. Clearly poised to enjoy it and yet—

“Quite,” said Aziraphale. “Well spotted. How clever of you to pick up on that when I’d expressly stated it as my intention.” He touched a napkin to his lips and used the motion to glance at Crowley, who was sputtering and turning a truly gratifying and undemonic shade of pink.

“Angel!” said Crowley, somewhere between a croak and a squeak, “what’re you on about—have you gone daft?”

“I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it,” Aziraphale said lightly, standing up. “I’ve spent millennia hardly daring to acknowledge our acquaintance, so it stands to reason that now that I can, I intend to enjoy the full benefit of my elegant serpentine accessory. Shall we?”

Crowley looked so completely poleaxed that it seemed the natural thing to do to offer him a hand up, which he took wordlessly and then actually made use of to pull himself to standing. He seemed to be trying to catch Aziraphale’s eye, but instead the angel ushered him out the door, hand at the small of his back, waving cheerily to the delighted restaurant staff who had gathered to see them out. Crowley almost tripped on the door frame.

Aziraphale sighed in deep satisfaction as they turned down the street toward the phantom manor. Verbal appreciation? Check. Well-nigh expert, if he did say so himself. Aziraphale could appreciate like nobody’s business, just ask any purveyor of sweets who’d ever served him. And what an unlooked for bit of good fortune that this particular form of “self care” and “amends” and “emotional healing” would have such exquisite side-effects!

It was true that the angel remained unsure exactly what path he’d be taking, professionally or personally, in the face of his new life circumstances. But wherever it led, it seemed that flustering a demon had much to offer in terms of entertainment along the way.


End file.
